it's friday are you ready to rumble joining me for tonight's big picture rumble marc harrold libertarian commentator attorney and author roger hickey co-director of the campaign for america's future and adam bitly editor in chief at net right daily and let's get right to it the fiscal cliff the president has laid out a plan he says ok one point six trillion dollars in new revenue tax increases. which would be income capital gains estate taxes the i just mentioned a couple games and state taxes go up investments in infrastructure let's rebuild this country help for struggling homeowners an extension of the payroll tax cut unemployment benefits this by the way sounds eerily like what dwight eisenhower did in the early fifty's when well during the recession the recession of fifty one fifty two and eisenhower came and started building it actually i was system the g.i.

bill they were there were you know in any case so where is this going to go i think you know frankly he should've gone a step farther as an initial mission negotiating point and said we're not going to roll back the bush tax cuts we're going to roll back the reagan tax cuts and you know let's take it back to seventy four percent but you know mark i think there's some mistakes here i don't think anything's really going to get done i think again the main thing the main constituency of the newly elected and the incumbents is their party it's not the american people they can pass a budget i don't see why anybody thinks they can all the sudden compromise and get this done when they have been able to pass a budget in years i don't agree with taking capital gains taxes i think you need to cut taxes and cut spending and then let the economy grow on its own i think this is a four solution i don't think you know your way to prosper never ever we no country is ever there would have when reagan was there carter had a much smaller reagan say that his way to prosperity that rate of people out of the money but he spent what we're all everybody is borrowing the money we're sixteen trillion in debt carter had a much smaller pie with a much higher tax rate reagan had a low tax rate a bigger pie again it's not just about splitting the pie we need a recipe for

a new party ok. well it's. i wish the president had the republican party of great eisenhower we could really rebuild this economy but instead he has a very intransigent republican party that's going to fight him every step of the way the amazing thing to me is that how much of a backbone the president's head in terms of putting his plan on the table rallying his troops the people who voted for him in the in the election and asserting i won this election it's time to raise taxes on the very wealthy and roll it back. and cut taxes for everybody else it's a very very strong hand he has and we'll see how long he can keep it going yeah well and the essentially what what you know it when i was harmonizing our what i was saying was you know i said howard grew us out of the recession and that's that's what this is a recipe for and as opposed to cutting us out of out of a recession after it's find out that obama doesn't deed have the republican party

that point eisenhower had but one thing that. we're seeing right now is that republicans already floating a trial balloon to essentially see if they can indeed get away with raising taxes how much could they get away with i think another thing that we're seeing too is that republicans are dealing with. having to fight this out on t.v. and they don't want to be mediately perceived to selling out but i believe that they're going to come to the table with an agreement before we get over this fictitious cliff that after the first of the year maybe. the first of the year when obama then has much more leverage over the whole operation because the tax rates go back to the rates of the clinton administration and then nobody has to defy gore grover norquist this well unless they want to roll back the reagan tax cuts right it's technically not a problem for grover yeah ok well we'll see we'll see where this goes this is going to be a fascinating one next topic leif on whose brilliant investigative reporter done

some incredible work this is he's ready for the nation right now and one of the things he found now. that we're able to look at some of the ira's disclosure forms and this is just the tip of the iceberg a lot of us will never know as a consequence of citizens united is that. some of the large groups funding the republican candidates in the election behind them we discovered the saudi royal family through one of their companies was fun funding a petroleum front group the. american petroleum institute which in turn was running really brutal ads against democrats and promoting republicans i mean this is exactly what justice stevens predicted in the citizens united dissent he said tokyo rose you know he said this would be like saying that tokyo rose has equal free speech in the united states during world war two. most many people are not old enough to remember that reference but but here it is and this is the same saudi royal family that has funded textbooks that are distributed around the arab world that say that jews make make mots out of the blood of of arab children and that is

basically a brutal and repressive dictatorship. or at least a kingdom shall we say not a democracy and shouldn't we be preventing foreign governments from flipping or buying our elections at a. well if this was them buying the election they did a terrible job i'm not sure that many of the causes that they found fareed while at all on election day but looking at foreign body coming into the political process. on a low i think it's much ado about nothing at all to see yeah i really think it is it appears that the obama campaign is accepting foreign contributions until they were called out on their system lacking the necessary security protocol i mean then they were going to go to abbottabad or dollar general i would never come out and show that they did not accept the foreign contributions over that it's equally horrible is not. i mean if you if you go go chavez on and fidel castro funding barack obama

but i'm not going to sleep at night thinking that the election was completely purchased by the venezuelan. will i just find it up i mean the people who want free spending also say we've got to have transparency we don't have any idea where all that money was spent and who spent it until after the election after the fact yeah the democrats did better than you would expect against all the corporate money that went up against them but but it is really disgusting that not only foreign corporations foreign countries but also u.s. corporations what however you define that are able to spend this much money in our election campaigns there is going to be a backlash and i think we're going to have another round of cleaning up our election campaigns do you think there's going to be enough publicly brought to this for there to be a backlash i don't i don't think most people realize i think people are just plain just discovering this and it should outrage every red blooded american no matter what your ideology so it will it will say i you know it's probably it's probably

not going to make its way to fox news there their second largest stockholder is saudi prince so i don't mark it doesn't our ajmi here's the thing there should be full transparency the a one side of the opinions better than the five four but you know there is speech out there i don't think it money is speech but money facilitates speech and how you spend money can be expressed so but the bottom line here is this is one of those things that the transparency needs to rule the day but technology will help with that and the candidates need to get out there and say look let the political market decide i don't take money from these people i don't believe in it and that's when the reasons you should vote for me but what happens when our political system becomes a proxy war between two big nations that are pouring money into two different party but here's here's one of the problems it's just what you said a minute ago see fox news is also a very large corporation major media outlets are very large corporations so if all the sudden you change what a corporation can spend within a certain amount of time to an election those media outlets may be similarly affected by that because they aren't they are in fact corporations if they can see

national corporations something that is a little old and so all the sudden you've got some real political censorship there if you're. selling a news agency because you're a corporation and you're publicly traded you can't spend money in a certain way to cover an election or to disparage candidates that can really get into a slippery slope i know people hate citizens united it's the bogeyman but there are some positive things about that decision but the main positive is the disclosure of the full disclosure roger you're we're going to get it we had television networks before citizens united we used to regulate some spending a lot more than we do now and there was plenty of free speech there were and there are i think there's the corporations that run the media have too much power but nobody's proposed that we restrict what what what n.b.c. spends on covering the media but it could happen but it could happen and i would encourage you to listen to just some of the alito has recently said about that one his concerns in the case but the problem is he said we have plenty of free speech then somebody is getting into the barometer of how much speeches how much free speech is plenty and how much of the no i was free speech is free speech but i'm

just going to get out it's out there you know i'm ok all right well let's let's move on to capitalism global warming president obama's e.p.a. is. taking steps maybe to mitigate future disasters maybe just to say b.p. you know you guys are bad we're going to keep you but they're they're cutting off b.p. from any federal contracts right now until they behave like an ethical company. says the ban is going to last until they're capable of meeting federal business standards and this is this is an interesting one i don't know what the standards are but clearly this is more than a slap on the wrist right now we have we just we just heard the the oceans are rising at sixty percent faster than predicted the planet is warming faster than predicted all the global warming predictions it turns out that what the actual measurements all around the world as bad or worse than the worst case scenarios and these are at this is an externality this is this is the cost of burning fossil fuels that the fossil fuel companies that are making

a fortune are not paying for. so roger how do we deal with this this problem of these companies internalizing the profits externalizing the costs particularly when the cost might be the thing that in the end of human civilization you know well it's certainly not controversial the idea that b.p. has the pay a big fine and has to not deal with the u.s. government for a while that's more than a slap on the wrist and i don't think i think the american people who saw their their beaches and their entire gulf destroyed are practically destroyed they're going to they're going to be in support of that the harder thing is how do you figure out an energy system that actually protects the environment instead of destroying it and you have that problem even with the very popular natural gas boom that's going on right now with fracking all over the country we're going to have to

figure out if that's our policy we're going to have to make sure that the government regulates those that fracking procedure to make sure that people's the tap water is not burning well and now we're we're we're seeing these stories there was the big one and it was the atlantic yesterday about to the farmers their cattle are now you know dying nerve or getting very very second and then that meat is being sold into the marketplace poisoned i mean mark externalities this seems like this is the failure of capitalism this is where the whole the whole libertarian argument that you should just leave it to free markets breaks down i don't think it really breaks down you can leave it to free markets obviously b.p. took a major head not just from the government government but by their consumers in the way audie i mean i'm not talking about that i'm talking about the issue of the externalities the you know dumping dumping their poison in our air and not having to pay yet but they're not just dumping poison of the air they're sort of first of all this idea that we don't we need energy ok we need energy everybody wants energy this is one of those things their body actually they want to cut back but they never do everybody acts like they can drive a hybrid but they don't s.u.v.

sales are through the roof so this isn't a failing of capitalism this is. capitalism works the market will respond the government is right in certain cases because you know it's a finite amount of water it's not b.p.'s ocean it's everybody's ocean theoretically and so it's one of those things that no the market will bear this is not a failing of libertarianism or capitalism but the government isn't doing more than a slap on the wrist they're much harder on them than i thought they would be because i thought through lobbying some other ways this one of those things the public just was going to let b.p. get away no matter how powerful they are they couldn't they couldn't survive the storm with their politics i think this is still a slap on the wrist and again if if you're looking at the genuine extra knowledge of you know warming the planet and poisoning people i mean you know forty five billion dollars or four and a half excuse me five five point four billion dollars well you know i'm still yet to see any action from the government to actually stop these problems that they cry about you know if the e.p.a. is really serious about protecting the environment when they banned all companies from engaging in the activity that they're banning e.p.a. banning b.p.

for participating in next week and auction the plants you know i think this comes back to who's really serious about this issue and i don't see the government being serious about this any more than likely i think is going to there's a big wake up call coming for all of us any more of tonight's big picture of. the great russian warriors. prevailing over houses and asperity. at the parade through paris. come they complain that. people's admiration two hundred.

good to. see a bit. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images cobol has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are all day. says.

back to the big picture of all our panel tonight marc harrold roger hickey and adam bite let's get back to it declaring bankruptcy despite declaring banks xs the second time laying off eighteen thousand unionized workers and putting the company up for sale hostess brands went today to a judge the judge said yes may we have two million dollars to give to bonuses for our senior executives our c.e.o. meanwhile a new york city we have hundreds of fast food workers walked off the job on thursday the biggest strike ever in the american fast food industry which is not saying a lot because that industry historically has not been unionized but this might be

the beginning the workers are saying that they want fifteen bucks an hour thirty thousand dollars thirty one thousand a year the national employment law project found that the average wage of the average age of workers in this sector was twenty eight these are not entry level jobs for teenagers like they were thirty years ago and that at the same time these companies mcdonald's yum brands and wal-mart they're all seen enormous profit growth wal-mart's up one hundred thirty percent over the you know since the recession so again doesn't the fact that we have people being paid poverty wages there are some of the largest consumers of food stamps and government assistance are employees of fast food restaurants and wal-mart again demonstrate that capitalism has failed here's another externality in this case the externality is the human misery that is being dumped by these companies that well now i think this is silly first off if mcdonald's that we're paying for food stamps so that people. can't believe that way people vote for the government to just hand the stuff out

that's the government's fault for handing out that type of stuff not just the last let's start now let's just let's be honest for a second if we suggest that the fast food companies are just going to throw out a fifteen dollar wage to the guy running the katherine sister the wages are going to go through the ceiling and so will the price of their food their sales will fall in the. donald even with the lower wages they have now did see their sales fall last month so it's not as if the mcdonald's pays like you know twenty twenty five dollars an hour jobs in germany that's what the job's worth and also in germany they have very strict labor laws yeah yes and they tell you to do is to get a job and they have unity that's how hard it is to fire a bad employee it's nearly impossible for both after they've been there for a year at what you have to have enough time here we have another out here where the only jobs you can get these days is a fast food job for young people and then you pay them minimum wages there is a union boom that is starting right now and the people that have to live at these

wages are not going to take it anymore so that's what a union is it's getting together and saying we want a better living conditions of better wages and we're going to withhold our labor until we get those i think the public which is watched the bain capital ization of host this is a very very very very sympathetic to these workers and as you say in germany people are willing to pay a little more when they go into fast food restaurant to know that these people are paid people actually are really willing to pay a little more what you're what you're looking at your misconstruing the fact that the government forces that so it's not that people were were just out there being generous what about a required government is going to be able to require the government is the people that when you're president we create flawed things i want the government to do we don't do it we create floors we don't allow kids to work in those places we raise have a minimum wage and the minimum wage everybody agrees to to live by now but no one's paying a sub minimum wage mark isn't isn't isn't the fact that the one of the largest cold

war it's one of the largest groups of consumers of food stamps and medicare in the united states is wal-mart employees and one of the other largest groups is fast food employees doesn't that speak to the failure of laissez faire capitalism doesn't speak to the failure at all actually this side. other americans are sympathetic to it americans are sympathetic to anything if you don't tell them what the consequences are we'll see if americans are really you you raise the minimum wage to nine or ten dollars we'll see how sympathetic americans are when they have to go in and pay more for the food so it's not your ten dollars an hour at ten dollars an hour it would be still lower than it was in one thousand sixty i mean adjusted yeah ok inflation adjusted and then one hundred sixty things were bad but if the minimum wage goes up adams right there have to raise the prices of their for profits will fall the employer fewer people there are tradeoffs to everything i think there's this idea lately that we can just do the government can just do everything and do whatever you need it to do it will do making automobiles used to be a low wage job until you need to caveman it was a very bloody fight but the unions established themselves and now everybody even

the japanese that have no unions are paying the same wages here in the united states we have to have that kind of ability of workers to buy and band together and as long as they exist there's a story of the city back so it's time for our last question thirty six congressional republicans and counting have distanced themselves from norquist pledge when a public with republicans backs against the wall looks like the norquist pledge might go up in smoke so if or when it does what job will grover take on next adam i don't know maybe he'll drop the times ball on new year's eve because i think he's going to become born again and he will encourage medium so that is the t.v. preacher and he'll do very well in that world who certainly has the person before he's about the same age as the steelers backup quarterback right now so maybe he'll take a shot at that after charlie back shot i love charlie batch of the steelers what's he going to do he's probably going do whatever he wants in this media culture because we're making more famous than ever he'll take this pledge and make it his

own show and i think he's going to take pics of phil's job so. marc harrold roger hickey adam violate thank you all for joining me tonight. one day after israel action president obama ordered yet another drone strike in yemen killing an alleged al qaeda operative in the process our nation's moral standing in the world was further downgraded family members of the man killed are outraged and be willed and wondering why their loved one was sentenced to death from above rather than arrested and put on trial they say that while odd non al qadi may have held an extremist ideology and may have lent some low level support

to al qaeda he was not actively engaged in any terrorist activities relative say the drone strike was a complete shock and that al qaida he could have easily been arrested and had he known he was being targeted he would have cooperated with the authorities the details of this latest drone strike a period of violate the rules of engagement that were laid out by our president's own counterterrorism adviser john brennan who in april suggested drone strikes are only used when a significant threat might be posed by an individual who is an operational leader of al qaeda or one of its associated forces and capturing the individual is not feasible as al qaida his brother the guy who got blown up in the drone strike as his brother told mcclatchy news we could have made sure he turned himself in if he was guilty of any crime that arrest him put him on trial. the united states used to stand for the rule of law we used to pride ourselves as the moral because for the rest of the world we didn't some merrily execute people without trials but those

days are long gone replaced by a semi covert drone warfare program started by former president george w. bush and ramped up by president obama who now has his own kill list and has ordered the drone execution of an american citizen most you know without due process most notably anwar all of a lockie and his sixteen year old son who were blasted away in yemen in two thousand and eleven driving this arguably illegal drone warfare program is a poisonous concoction of fear and nationalism the post nine eleven epidemic of fear that swept across the nation let bush and cheney completely remake our country it happened here at home with a massive surveillance state and the destruction of civil liberties and it happened abroad with the drone warfare program that is killing handfuls of terrorists while radicalizing thousands hundreds of thousands millions of average citizens in the

countries that were not even at war with people live in constant fear of robots in the sky and watch with horror as these aerial robots create cratered bloody masses in their communities when pakistan's foreign minister was asked why so many people in that country and hate america she responded simply drones and we're doing all this in the name of stopping terrorism but the reality is americans really toted have that much to fear when it comes to terrorism every year for the past decade more people have died from slipping in their bathtubs just here in the united states that have been killed worldwide by islamic terrorists. just making bethany factures a little nervous but the greatest tragedy in this drone war is how we've forgotten the most basic moral principle of all the golden rule treat others as you wish to

be treated it applies not just to preschoolers but also the global superpowers. consider the scenario mexican government gets to intelligence that they know narco terrorists is a big problem for the gomery now a known narco terrorism is holed up in a house in phoenix arizona they fly a drone over downtown phoenix fired out on the building but allow it up destroyed it and killing their target along with a handful of american citizens who happen to live next door how would we react so called news would be calling for a return of the mexican american war or what if a known terrorist affiliated with the basque separatists was riding in a card out of fifth avenue in manhattan and a spanish drone flying above new york city launched a hellfire missile a bullet or a to the car killing and injuring dozens of nearby civilians and leaving a giant crater in the middle of a busy manhattan street do you really think americans will say well i was drunk

things sure are a nice way to fight terrorists drone technology is not exclusive to the united states it's cheap it's available it's all over in the not too distant future any nation with a couple million dollars which is pretty much every nation on earth could have weaponized drones and tragically by firing drones into a nation that we're not even at war with we're setting a dangerous moral precedent and a arguably military prison for the future of drone warfare washington post a.b.c. news poll shows that eighty three percent of americans support the bush obama drone policy. we can't imagine apparently that one day these same drones might be used against us by states nations or by well funded terrorist simply following our example or that our promises will probably spark a frenzy of drone wars around the planet the hysterical fear of terrorists and

terrorism that bush and cheney hyped up for political purposes has so badly caused us to lose touch with that basic core guiding principle at the at the at the rock bed of american morality the golden rule. america needs to reclaim the high moral ground and stop or at least limit to genuine combat situations our use of what is' drugs. and that's the way it is tonight friday nov thirtieth two thousand and twelve for more information on any of the stories we covered this at our website to tom hartman dot com free speech to edward dot com and if you missed any of the night's show you can now watch an h.d. on hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture also check out our two you tube channels or links of target are also there you can find all the different ways you can send us feedback on the lions that's of course for those interests and don't

forget democracy begins with you get out there and get active tag your it so you next week. or you. don't tell me. let's.

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